How to brand your startup

The world would be a lot more fun if most startups didn't seem to have experienced a personality vasectomy.

Alas, I think we've evolved to conform - you used to take part in the tribe to survive, after all.

There are good reasons for this, you idiot

I bet there are. You want to get the Minimum Viable Product Built and validated.

You need to make money, you're going to fail without it.

Creating a pretty website won't help with that.

But... will it?!

Maybe!

When we knew that PostHog was something we wanted to launch, we questioned how we'd get the most users signed up.

The product on launch day was going to be free, but we still asked ourselves: "what would stop me from using this thing?"

A crappy website that looks like a startup that could disappear at any moment, felt like the most likely princ

Why?

• It signals the product may not be secure - a lack of competence in the website shows a lack of attention to detail
• It signals the team behind the product isn't very strong - and won't improve quickly over time, or become a "must use" tool
• It signals the product may not exist in a few more weeks time, which would be a waste of time - when it's obvious the website was thrown together in a day

Your company needs to stand for something

Take two examples:

• Open source product analytics
• We help engineers build better products

There is a tradeoff between the two.

The first is very clear. We started with it when this is what we had.

As we became more well known, we shifted to the latter. This is a better reflection of why our company exists - it is more than just a piece of software. We introduced it because the company was getting larger, and the scope of what we were setting out to achieve had increased. We now have 8+ products, and we produce a ton of content to help engineers build better products. The need for total clarity wasn't as important later on, relative to the need for us standing for something.

Create your brand for someone

One of the most important things we did was to create an Ideal Customer Profile. When we launched, we weren't sure quite how focused we'd need to be on engineers "vs" product managers.

We realized, after launching, that we could go all in on engineers (and technical founders) - they make up around 80% of our users. Our brand has become more oriented for these users as a result.

Here are some specific ways we got more specific for this audience after we clarified it:

• We added API examples to our website
• We added a "you'll hate PostHog if" section to our homepage, which calls out many pet hates that engineers have when trying to buy, install and use more traditionally-targeted software
• We have pricing that is more complex (ie we moved to a pricing by product, on a usage basis, model - away from an all in one price) but better value - we felt more technical people would be happy coping with more complexity to get a better deal
• In the product, we worked on SQL access so technical people could get to the underlying data better
• We redesigned our entire UX to have higher information density, dark mode and more flexibility

... but your brand must be a reflection of you

We have often been impressed at the level of polish that others can acheive.

Quoting Cory, our lead designer: "We aren't the best in the world at being polished, but we can be the best in the world at being ourselves".

We sometimes make business decisions based on who we are, and what we want to do - not always what may, for example, generate the most revenue growth.

For example, we set out initially expecting to have an open core model. We'd offer open source software, and some people in big enterprises, would self host and pay for the party for everyone else. We felt this would work as there was no real competition, whereas in cloud, we had lots of unicorn competitors. However, we just love shipping new features, and after our first hackathon, we wound up with session replay (ie a new feature, big enough to be its own product), which took off and this resulted in a multi-product approach. As a result, we could compete in cloud by being way wider than everyone else. Eventually, we removed our paid self hosted offering entirely, went all in on multi product in cloud, focused on "getting in first" with earlier stage companies instead of the largest enterprises, and our motivation, ambition and growth all took off as a result.

Brand isn't just your website...

... it is instead how your company is experienced by others.

Here is a non-exhaustive list, there are dozens more examples than this though:

• it's how much you invest in each function in your company relative to each other
• it's what you look for when you hire people, and it's the process you use to hire with
• how you decide what to build - do you ship features early, or do you focus on meeting the needs of your largest customer with every new thing
• how much you are design vs engineering vs product led
• how you email your customers
• the kind of people you hire into Customer Success or Sales
• the tone of voice on your website
• who is on your board
• how your pricing works
• how frequently you email customers in your activation flow
• how your social media works
• the marketing channels you pick

You can't 80:20 everything

A lot of design / brand work has an increasing marginal return. This is because a great brand's purpose is that you stand out. You do not stand out by being average!

So, if you're serious, go nuts on your brand. Go weirdly hard.

To give you an example, we built a merch store:

• we started with me emailing users for their address and size, manually ordering merch, it arriving at my house, and me then posting it internationally to them
• then we set up a store on shopify, I just threw our logo onto an amusingly wide selection of items (PostHog shower curtain, anyone?) - it was cool to just have merch for sale and a way of giving it
• then created custom components and built it into our website directly so it's perfectly integrated
• then we booked a photo shoot, got a bunch of our team to it, and took custom photos of our team wearing everything
• who knows what happens next!

To give a second example:

• a founder I know has a product with 300,000 users
• he has redone his website and is very pleased with, that he should launch. It is way clearer than what he has now.
• however, I pushed him for how to make it less boring. Something most people do not ask.
• he talked about how his product helps people explore data, so an exploration theme could give it more personality.
• he can now get a graphic designer to work with him
• and so on - just don't stop pushing the things that matter to you